Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Illusion, For or Against

One of our greatest quandaries concerns illusion. Is it
treacherous, undesirable, even harmful; or optimistic, consolatory, even
life-sustaining? Is it near-synonymous with hope, and thus a good thing, or
mendacious, self-deceptive, and thus a bad one? To take one example: is it
better to know one has only six months more to live and so take the necessary
provisions, or better to remain blissfully ignorant up to the end?

There is thus no one easy answer to the fundamental question
about our mortality; or, rather, there are two: for the rationalist
intellectual, disbelief in an afterlife is empowering; for the common man, but
also some intellectuals, belief in it is the panacea. It is, of course, a
dilemma that runs through many lives, and is addressed in the arts of film,
theater, and fiction, and philosophy.

In fiction, the prime example is Cervantes’s masterpiece, Don Quixote. of which, to my shame, I
have only second-hand knowledge. That is because I am a slow reader and have seldom
attacked a long book, unless in a financially propitious reviewing assignment. One
must, I gather, choose between the romantic fantasies of the Don, and the
lower-class hedonism of his squire, Sancho Panza.

Of course, there is folly in combating windmills, but is
there no value in perceiving a hefty peasant girl as the noble Dulcinea? Does
not the idealizing illusion of a lover or spouse as a Michelangelo David or a Botticelli
Venus make life pleasanter?

I suppose the assumption is that whatever suits the individual
most is the best attitude toward illusion. Yet one may choose to pursue this
troubling question by seeking answers from admired artists. But where to begin?

Let us consider the great author of Les Illusions perdues, who both was and was not a defender of
illusion. Balzac was both a Realist and a Romantic, which is to say both a
pursuer of hopes that qualify as illusions and a hard-nosed accepter of things
as they are.

Take two of his most quoted utterances. On the one hand:
“The woman one buys—and that is the less expensive—wants a lot of money; the
one that gives herself takes up all of our time.” That is not very
pro-illusion. But how about this: “In matters of love there is nothing more
persuasive than a courageous stupidity”? There speaks a womanizer who must have
entertained some whopping illusions.

Proust--in love at any rate—was an anti-illusionist: “The
bonds that unite another person to oneself exist only in our mind. . . .
Notwithstanding the illusion by which we like to be cheated, we exist alone.”
It is indeed in love that illusion thrives. Thus Nietzsche observed: “Love is
the state in which a man sees things most widely different from what they are. The
force of illusion reaches its zenith here, as likewise its sweetening and
transfiguring power.” That sounds equivocal, as does so much about illusion.

Now let’s skip back to Patrick Henry: “It is natural for man
to indulge in the illusions of hope.” That sounds pro-illusion. But here comes
the anti: “For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to
know the whole truth. To know the worst, and to provide for it.”

There are two great plays for which the matter of illusion
is central: Henrik Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” and Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman
Cometh.” About the former, I wrote elsewhere (and reprinted it in my book,
“Singularities”): “Hjalmar [Ekdal] is wounded by his weakness, his megalomania;
Hedwig [his daughter] by her dimming eyesight, the drabness of her present and
future, the very fragility of puberty. Yet the illusion of forest, sky, sea—of
greatness, freedom, beauty—keeps them going.” And further: “[M]an cannot slay
the illusion, the life-lie he lives by: if he tries to, he kills himself.”

In “The Iceman Cometh,” now in a fine revival at the Brooklyn
Academy of Music, the drunkards in Harry Hope’s saloon delude themselves with a
pipe dream of being able to stop drinking and resume active life. When the charismatic
salesman Theodore “Hickey” Hickman persuades them to give up their pipe dreams
and go forth to face reality, it ends up in failure and reversion to those
drunken pipe dreams.

So, whether called life-lie or pipe dream, illusion is what
keeps these failures from crumbling—pathetic if you will, but not
reprehensible. Wising up, and assuming responsibility, means suicide for one of
them and murder for another; waiting for death for yet another and alcoholic
purblindness for the rest. Even the prostitutes manage to insist that they are
not whores, merely tarts.

But careful, friends, with your condescension, let alone
contempt; on some level we are all illusionists. In the most secret chamber of
our mind, the one closest to unconsciousness, we are, I repeat, all
illusionists. There, however well we know that all men are mortal--and, a trifle
surprisingly perhaps, all women too—we don’t think that we as well will die.
Reading the obituaries in the paper merely confirms us in a sense of fake
superiority to those stiffs: What? We too? Impossible!

We can imagine ourselves rich, famous, champions of this or
that, lovers of some stunning woman or gorgeous man, but cadavers, worm food,
never! The only thing that fully relieves us from fearing and denying death is
death itself. Why, even the popularity of movies about ghosts and vampires merely
confirms us in our delusion (i.e., an advanced form of illusion) that there is
some kind of life after death, be it only as a disembodied scarecrow or a
starved bloodsucker. We may not choose the bottle or pills to make us forget; a
talent for oblivion sustains all of us in our illusions.

“For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth. To know the worst, and to provide for it.”

"Whole truth" and "the worst" are illusions. No truth can ever be the whole truth, and there's always something worse than 'worst'. By pretending that something is the 'worst', we find relief that we've confronted the truth that can't get any worse.

Without illusion there can be no romance, as Maura Stanton eloquently expresses in her poem "The Veiled Lady":

The Veiled Lady

In the 19th Century, clever mediumsWould rap a table, making the dead speak.Ghostly hands would hover in the air,Heads would appear, Caesar, Napoleon.Sometimes the whole immaterial bodyOf someone’s beloved, dead daughter or sisterGlided through a room allowing swordsTo pass though it. Once a husband roseAnd tried to caress what was never there,A veiled lady he thought was his wife,While others in the room almost faintedTo see him step right through her crinoline.D.D. Home could levitate out windowsAnd float above a busy London street.Imagine sitting on the horsehair sofaAlmost hysterical, watching that miracle…But it was done with thick plate glass and lights,A conjurer’s trick, just like the accordionPlayed by a ghost in front of Robert BrowningWho shuddered when a spirit hand reached outAnd put a wreath of flowers on ElizabethThough afterwards he called it sham, imposture.But that’s what I am, that’s what we all areTo one another, a trick of light and glassProjected before an audience of dupes.Don’t you see I’m only an illusion?You look aghast. You think I’m cynicalBut when you touch me in the dark at nightYou touch biology, twitchings and snores,Wetness, jerking muscles. Wild imagesFlicker across my convoluted brainAs it constructs a person out of dreams.That woman you say you love doesn’t exist.Look at the way our faces have appearedOn the black glass of the picture windowNow that it’s evening, and the lights are on.There she is, standing beside you, smiling.Go to her. Embrace her if you can.

About Me

I've written for over 50 years on theatre, film, literature, music and fine arts for the Hudson Review, New Leader, New Criterion, National Review, New York magazine, Opera News, Weekly Standard, Broadway.com, Bloomberg News, The Westchester Guardian and on the Yonkers Tribune website. I'm continuing my contributions to the New York Times Book Review, Weekly Standard and New Criterion. Recently I've been seen on Heat Street. I have a PhD from Harvard University in Comparative Literature.